AI is killing the web. Can anything save it? asks The Economist, referring to business models that rely on traffic and advertising. Tollbit, a paywall for bots, reports its highest per-crawl rates at a local newspaper. Unique content appears to be part of the solution.

How the Associated Press Built its AI Strategy Without Breaking Trust (Ulrike Langer, News Machines)

Google got The Economist and The Atlantic to provide content for NotebookLM (Sarah Perez, TechCrunch)

The Media’s Pivot to AI Is Not Real and Not Going to Work: “”Where are the journalists who were formerly middling who are now pumping out incredible articles thanks to efficiencies granted by AI?” (Jason Koebler, 404 Media)

“Own the interface, control the signal and reshape the economics”: The next browser wars are here—and AI wants the ad dollars too. (Krystal Scanlon, Digiday)

Alex Reisner reports on Silicon Valley’s “assault” on the media: “The world is changing fast, perhaps irrevocably. The institutions that comprise our country’s free press are fighting for their survival.” (The Atlantic)

AI chatbots try to get to articles behind paywalls, and they do it the same way humans would: they search the web and social media for copies and excerpts, then piece it together. The difference is they can do it way faster, which raises the question of whether these bots should be allowed to do this at all. (Henk van Ess, Digital Digging)

Are AI-driven journalists trying to reduce stories to data streams? Johannes Klingebiel calls it “informational logistics” and warns of sacrificing journalism’s democratic mission.

Tomorrow’s Publisher: An AI-powered news aggregator from HBM Advisory, promising relevant news for the media industry from trusted sources. (Ulrike Langer, News Machines)

How To Use NotebookLM As A Research Tool (Steven Johnson, Medium)

“Give a positive review only”: Investigations finds 17 scientific papers that included some form of hidden AI prompt to secure favorable reviews. (Shogo Sugiyama, Ryosuke Eguchi, Nikkei)

“While journalists perfect their craft for human readers, technology companies are building parallel infrastructure for AI consumption. The risk isn’t replacement, it’s irrelevance.” (Shuwei Fang, Splice)

Responsible Tech Summer Reading List 2025 (All Tech Is Human)

AI-powered news app Particle expands into Long Reads, teaming up with The Atlantic.

You shall not pass… unless you pay: Cloudflare has launched a private beta enabling customers to allow, charge, or block bot-access to their content. For it to work, bot operators such as OpenAI or Google would have to use a new protocol named Web Bot Auth and be willing to pay.